The best of Bob Olhsson's writings and tour info

The ONLY difference between a “star” and anybody else is the size of their audience. This is dictated almost entirely by their individual ability to build relationships.

–

Process has indeed taken over creativity. Progress seems to be defined as “doing what we did twenty years ago only lots cheaper.”

We’re lost in making sonic cartoons whereas music used to be about epics performed on stage that couldn’t really be done justice by any recording.

–

Every new development in recording I can think of since the ’60s has been for the purpose of saving money on “talent.”
Jack Clement recorded and mixed Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On” in less than three minutes.
Has anybody REALLY made a better rock record?

–

The bar has been raised significantly. Generic commodity music has always been free.
People only pay to hear exceptional music or for hip souvenirs to show off to their friends.
–

Music has only recently become a generic commodity.
It wasn’t high art but it also wasn’t genre-flavored muzak.
Anybody who ever saw a James Brown or a Jackie Wilson show KNOWS the possibilities.

–

… selling singles alone should be a lucrative endeavor, ..
Historically it hasn’t been at all.
This is because it costs every bit as much to raise a single to a high attention profile as it does to do the same for an album.

–

Contrary to common belief, the bottom-line is a compelling performance and not just “the song.”

Invest first in what’s in front of the mike and then in the mike

The challenge is finding people who are really good at all of the roles.
Just throwing money at an artist’s challenges doesn’t work.

I’d try to find a successful publicist or a journalist who wants to move into management.
There’s nothing like being the only artist on a manager’s plate and those qualifications would enable a new manager to raise money.

Most “analysts” have a financial stake in internet industry stock values while they know very little about the entertainment industry or its history.

In the real world every artist always has to find their own unique audience and this has always happened in a wide variety of different ways.
The first sign of a fool or a rip-off artist is anybody claiming to have a formula.

–

If the label also has has management chops, it could work out well.

Motown was a management company with great record sales chops.
That worked out better for the artists than many other labels of the singles era did.

Management chops and sales chops are what it’s really all about.

–

You really need the right team.
As people figure it out, lots of folks at management companies and labels who only supply money are probably going to be left behind.

–

A lot of this (is) just a matter of competition.
You’re going to have a hard time getting a deal for somebody who obviously isn’t nearly as good as the best cover bands in most towns.
That (is) the audience’s benchmark.
Most of the work for cover bands got replaced by disco in the ’70s.

–

I think you need to just REALLY be yourself and work it out in front of an audience. What works best will probably be pretty unique.

Music has an effect on the breathing of the listener. Great music has a very pleasurable effect. There’s never been a lot of great music.

–

Music has always had lots of competition.

While it’s common to look at music as fashion, I believe that there really is a quality problem that has been caused by economics.
There is as much talent as ever but little to economically motivate a music career compared to the past.
It’s a trend that has been going on since the 1950s.

–

This is true but I’d argue music exposure being dependent on advertising supported media and venues is the root of the problem.
A&R signs what they can get exposed. They are messengers carrying an ugly ugly message.
Whats for sale is the artists audience.

–

Any idiot can put together a track in Acid so music that sounds like that is a generic commodity that nobody is going to be willing to pay for.

–
I think it’s important that sweeping terms such as “the music industry” get left behind because this kind of “business as usual” characterization only perpetuates the problems.

Individuals are the ones who screw over other individuals and THEY are who OUGHT to be taking the heat for sleazy business practices instead of being lumped together as “the industry” or being allowed to get away with fiction suggesting “it’s the label’s fault.”

Every manager and label wants to get as many known-quantities into the credits as they can in order to arouse interest in and lend credibility to the unknown-quantity which is their artist.

Everybody developing talent needs to find ways of protecting their investment from changes made precisely for this purpose.
One very effective method I’ve seen is a full-rate rerecording royalty but one that has a cap of a certain figure that everybody feels is fair.
Yes this costs the artist but it also allows maximum flexibility without anybody getting screwed.

It’s a sad state of affairs that American Idol is more effective at connecting musical artists with new fans than today’s promoters and broadcasters seem to be.

–

Develop a reputation for people standing in line to see your live shows. A&R people are looking for people who have an audience.

Taking a hamburger into the bank that’s better than a McDonald’s isn’t going to get them to finance your restaurant!

–

I spent ten years with an electronic space music label.
The artists who could go out and perform, maybe not in every detail but who could still get across the essence of what they were doing live were the only ones who sold enough CDs to cover expenses.
If I were an A&R person, this kind of an experience would play a huge role in my decision process.
It isn’t about going out and being a rock star as much as going out and learning how to connect one’s music with people.

–

I’m guessing the days of walking into a record executive’s office with an accoustic guitar and walking out with a contract are over?
Sounds to me more like that time is right around the corner again!
Sending out demos to a label is a joke because what labels are looking for is artists who can demonstrate that they have fans.

They can easily hire the best producers, songwriters and session players.

–

I figure the majors will deal only in catalog with a new generation of management companies financing new artists. It’s the only way the numbers work for singles.

–

During the ’90s I had a hell of a time finding decent sounding live performances to share with my daughter in San Francisco.
There is little uglier that “sound re-enforcement” being applied to symphony orchestras and opera yet that was precisely what I encountered everywhere.
Stadium concerts are not great sound and most club sound is horrendous. Kids only have DJs for their school dances and live bands are MIA.

–

…Musicians don’t perceive a career as a possibility and do not pursue it as furiously as they once did…

That’s the basic problem and cheaper recording gear or a change in record label personnel can’t change it. A reignited live music scene combined with live webcasting could. Music has always been a bottom-up business.

I believe if that were actually the case, we’d be talking about great new artists and not about any of this other stuff. The music listings in the entertainment section of most large U.S. city newspapers speaks volumes compared to what such looked like twenty or thirty years ago.

–

Let me add, the Internet has been tried for over ten years and has been way less successful at breaking new artists than carrier-current college radio.

A lot of smart people will be moving on.

–

So the general public now gets to have “the A&R experience” only without an assistant to do a first sort. Talk about something utterly useless…

Most of the A&R types I knew just used demos to decide who was worth going out to see live.
While they don’t bother with anybody sending a mediocre demo, the ability to make a great record means little or nothing to a label.
They can always hire a producer!

If I were doing a demo, it’d be a video of a great live show

–

There have always been a million vanity projects and massive competition for people’s ears.
You’ll only read about the stuff that stuck around for one reason or another.
I really tend to see the “too much competition” theory as an excuse.

If this were 1970 we’d all be talking about new albums and not recording gear. We’re still talking about those same albums.

The infrastructure is what separates the wheat from the chaff because the fans will vote with their wallets and the results determine who moves on to greater exposure.

–

The problem is exposure.
Lots of stuff claims to be exposure but really isn’t.
Exposure, at least to me, means that a large number of people will unexpectedly bump into it.

In the old days a hit record was something that got a bit of exposure and quickly developed a great deal of word-of-mouth attention.
It was like a chain reaction that you set off. You could buy a hit but it would cost more than you could possibly earn from it.

This exposure could happen with air play but it could also happen in live venues.
For example I understand Zappa’s shows were a legend in New York before he ever got involved with recording.

I don’t know if it’s really that different today.

–

My experience has been that live music is always far more compelling than a recording of the same music.
This assumes people can play and a sound system isn’t standing in the way of the audience’s perception.
I love recording but fear it remains at best an imitation of the real thing.
A lot of the problem is imitations of imitations.

The potential for mating is a really good way to get people out to experience live music.
I think a lot of today’s sales problem is related to how hard it has become to find great sounding live music.
We got pretty good at fooling ourselves with recordings but a lot of the younger generation seems lost on what music is all about.
Watching the James Brown Band, you quickly learned what music could be.

The first time I had that life changing musical experience was a Broadway Show.
The second was helping record the Gospel Workshop of America while I was in high school.
The third was JB and the last was an 18 year old girl singing Indian classical music in a living room up the street from my apartment in San Francisco.

–

It would be done the same way as before.
You need to begin at the beginning.
That means entertaining eyeball to eyeball in people’s living rooms.
It also means including songs that people already know. It means music people can dance to and sing along with.

–

The Beatles and the Stones were very successful cover bands. I can assure you that they were not “sound alike” bands.

A band ought to be doing the very best material they can get their hands on as determined by their audience’s reaction.
This was what everybody had to do in the singles era. Ones own songs needed to be just as good.
The album era allowed the luxury of experimenting with playing just one’s own material.

The album era is over…

–

To me, it’s all about connecting with a lot of people using as much word-of-mouth as possible.

That scares some folks who’ll shoot themselves in the foot rather than risking rejection by a large enough audience to support them.
This kind of an artist death wish is very real and there’s a whole cult built around it. Most blame their lack of success on “the music industry.”

–

Lack of quality has always been more obvious to casual listeners than to most musicians and producers in my experience.

There are a thousand rationalizations for making really cheap, over-produced records but I don’t think anybody’s being fooled and sales figures appear to back that up.
Yes some awful sounding records are selling big but only behind immense publicity and promotion campaigns that turn them into fleeting fashion.

I keep coming back to “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”

You couldn’t record a song any cheaper and it’s a “cover.” Are today’s records really any better if as good?

–

In fact, what they’re releasing is artists who, for one reason or another, already HAVE the million wizoos because the rest don’t don’t stand even the slightest chance with radio and the promoters. This kind of crap-music has always been around and always will be. The problem is that nobody’s managing to sell the good stuff in addition the way we used to.

I totally agree with Jules that we mostly need a new generation of great managers and I’ll add that we also need a new generation of great club-sized venues and press. All the talk about “new business models” is just flack from the computer industry who are standing around with their sweaty palms out looking for their own piece of the record labels’ action since they can’t seem to sell anything other than music on the net besides porn.

++++++++++++++++

Below added 17.5.2010

–

The place to step up is to help create venues where youngsters can perform for each other. They not only need to learn how to perform, they also need to have the kinds of experiences that allow learning what it is to be a fan.

Recording is only a reflection of what’s going on with music. That’s hard for lots of us recording-oriented folks to swallow. It took me more that ten years to accept the fact that my generation had really let popular music go to hell. There still is great stuff but there is no longer any way to connect it with fans and the percentage of great stuff is declining because of that problem.

I’m selfish, I want lots of great stuff to master!

–

I think one thing we need more of is really tiny venues. LOTS of them.

–

Just substitute the word “sex” for the word “music” and this stuff becomes pretty easy to figure out.

Music is all about relationships and communication among people. When music “works,” it’s generally because it’s part of a two way conversation. I think people take recording technology way way too seriously.

–

The care that the Dead organization takes with their fans should be a template for every aspiring performer. The whole thing grew out of house parties. In fact the whole San Francisco rock scene grew out of monthly house/rent parties. If you begin at the very beginning inviting people to hear music in your home, you CAN have a career if the experience is entertaining to the folks who show up.

–

I call this beginning at the beginning instead of being a poser acting like you’ve got a bigger audience than you really have. Passionate fans are developed one at a time, eyeball to eyeball. The thing is that high school kids have got to have this experience and not just adults.

We had top 40 completely wired at Motown. Then I moved to San Francisco and saw what Bill Graham had literally built out of rent party bands playing for high schoolers and experimental broadcasters. Most of the “industry” has been coasting on what Graham built in the mid ’60s, what Albert Grossman built on college campuses in the early ’60s and what Mo Ostin, Leonard Chess, John Hammond and a few others built during the 1940s and ’50s. Hip Hop is the only exception but that was in the ’80s.

–

The music business has always been lots more of a meritocracy than most people realize. Fan magazines love to make up payola stories but believe me, if labels could actually buy airplay that would sell albums, the average major label release would have been selling a lot more than an average of under 1000 units over the past 20 years. The music would probably be lots better too!

–

Payola never got anybody more than a few spins. Radio can’t afford to play anything that doesn’t please the advertisers because they are in the business of selling advertising. There was a period in the ’80s when you had to pay extortion money to consultants in order to keep radio from dropping your record but radio has never played a record for very long only because somebody paid them to, at least that I’m aware of.

You can groom a horse and spend a fortune getting them into the starting gate but in the end your horse still needs to win the race.

–

Originally Posted by Fleaman View Post

Wouldn’t a free public focus group be the top itunes downloads? Couldn’t radio just play those and be done with it?

Put that together with an engaging LIVE DJ, put it on net radio and you’ve got something that could earn a fortune. It’s just sitting there for somebody to do.

Only reason it hasn’t happened is because everybody wants automated radio that doesn’t need to pay DJs or royalties.

–

Originally Posted by crufty View Post

somewhere along the line businesses got afraid of technology. technology needs to be embraced because the market has embraced it. radio waves are great for sports broadcasts and news, but why should music be played on it…

The problem is that technology was embraced by Madison Avenue and American business has been in a drunken stupor of focus group tests and micro-marketing that impresses stock analysts even though a LOT of knowledgeable ad agency folks will whisper to you that there is no evidence that this stuff actually works selling anything other than stock in the company to investors.

Why should music be played on the radio?

Simple, most people absolutely love being turned on to an engaging new record and hearing the new music they love played repeatedly until they burn out on it. What’s missing is that focus groups have been picking the new music rather than the public voting with their wallet and airplay reflecting what people are actually buying. That disconnect is why today’s music radio sucks and nobody’s engaged and listening.

Todd Storz had gotten music radio right in the first place. He and Gordon McLendon

created the infrastructure that what we now call rock and roll grew up in completely on its own. Then everybody got greedy and started trying to second-guess the public.

And here we are right back at the beginning having completely forgotten our roots. I think there’s an amazing parallel between our economic train wreck where what we learned in the ’30s was forgotten and our musical train wreck where what we learned in both the 1920s and the 1950s has been forgotten.

–

If it were me, I’d be selling bands on doing live webcasts.

3 Responses to “On building success”